January 18, 1998

Shaking Out the DustbinWhat might have happened if the Mensheviks had prevailed?

By MAURICE ISSERMAN

FROM THE OTHER SHORE
Russian Social Democracy After 1921. By André Liebich.
Illustrated. 476 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press. $48.

n the summer of 1903 the exiled leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party met, first in Brussels and later in London, to discuss their movement's future. The meetings were acrimonious and ended in a split between those delegates who followed the rigorous centralizer Lenin and their opponents, the group around Yuli Martov. Lenin's faction, commanding a majority at the meetings, became known as the Bolsheviks; Martov's faction, with its minority of delegates, became the Mensheviks. Few people outside the ranks of the party, and the ever-observant czarist secret police, paid the slightest attention.

That would change in the midst of World War I. In March 1917 a spontaneous uprising of war-weary workers in St. Petersburg led to the overthrow of the czarist regime. Exiled Bolsheviks and Mensheviks flocked back to the new revolutionary capital. In the spring of 1917, the Mensheviks enjoyed far more popular support than their Bolshevik rivals and were perhaps the strongest political party in Russia. Restrained by democratic scruples and the belief that Russia needed to go through a period of capitalist development before being ready for Socialism, the Mensheviks refrained from seizing power. Instead, they lent their support to a provisional Government representing a coalition of parties.

Unfortunately for the Mensheviks -- and for Russia -- the provisional Government proved incapable of extricating the country from the futile bloodletting of the Eastern Front. The political mood in Russia grew ever more extreme that summer and fall, with mutinies in the army, land seizures in the countryside and intrigue and conspiracy in the cities. The Bolsheviks were the chief beneficiaries of the disorder, and in November armed Bolshevik detachments in St. Petersburg and Moscow dealt the tottering provisional Government its death blow. When the Mensheviks protested, a onetime Menshevik turned Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, scornfully consigned his former comrades to ''the dustbin of history.''

André Liebich seeks to rescue the Mensheviks from that dustbin, and also from the condescension of subsequent generations of historians. A professor of international politics and history at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Liebich writes in his important new book, ''From the Other Shore,'' that ''historical and social studies seem unable to adopt any perspective other than that defined by outcome, considered as the only possible outcome. . . . It is a form of intellectual philistinism which makes scholars prisoners of events as they have occurred.''

''From the Other Shore'' raises the question of what would have happened if the Mensheviks had prevailed in 1917. Would they have gone the route of the Bolsheviks, laying the groundwork for the repressive totalitarianism to follow? Or would they have found another path -- committing themselves to a radical transformation of Russian society while at the same time respecting (as far as possible in difficult circumstances) the political liberties of their opponents? If we could answer that question, we would be better able to untangle Marxism from Leninism, Leninism from Stalinism, and assign to or absolve each of its share of responsibility for the gulag.

Although Liebich identifies closely with Martov's group, he avoids the temptation of reading back into its history an early and absolute division from the Bolsheviks. Rather, he sees a ''broad continuum'' linking the two factions until the Revolution, nothwithstanding their disputes. Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were, after all, at least technically members of the same party until 1912. Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike were intimately acquainted with the inside of the Czar's prisons and penal camps (and nothing works quite as effectively as a common enemy to encourage unity). In 1914 Menshevik and Bolshevik delegates to the Duma, the Russian parliament, stood together in opposing the war -- a courageous decision, and something that distinguished both groups from most of their western European comrades. It was thus not surprising that factional lines proved permeable. Trotsky was not the only Bolshevik leader with a Menshevik past, and some Menshevik leaders were former Bolsheviks.

Faced after November 1917 with the stark choice of supporting the new Soviet Government or siding with the counterrevolutionaries, the Mensheviks chose the role of loyal opposition. The Bolsheviks had no use for opposition, loyal or otherwise, but their crackdown on the Mensheviks over the next few years was gradual and inconsistent. All the important Menshevik leaders except Martov were eventually imprisoned, but, as Liebich notes, they were treated quite leniently by later standards: they maintained their political organization within prison and ''guards were told to go away when they intruded on a Menshevik meeting.'' By 1922, however, most of the Menshevik leaders had been forced to leave Russia. Martov died abroad in 1923, but others kept the Menshevik cause alive in exile -- in Germany until the rise of Hitler, then in France until the Nazi occupation and finally in New York.

In time, the dimensions of the totalitarian terror in their former homeland became apparent. Although information from within the Soviet Union was quite limited, the Mensheviks had the advantage of knowing many of the principal actors personally. (Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor during the Moscow show trials in the 1930's, was a former Menshevik; there were grim jokes in exile circles that his persecution of the old Bolsheviks represented the Mensheviks' revenge on those who had driven them from Russia.) Some of the Mensheviks, like David Dallin, eventually secured reputations among the leading Kremlinologists of their generation. Ironically, the last surviving Menshevik, Boris Sapir, died in December 1989, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Liebich asks us to see the Mensheviks as something more than political losers. They stand, he writes, ''at the very heart of the crisis of Marxism.'' Our judgment of them as political actors and thinkers -- as a possible alternative leadership for a revolutionary Russia -- can help determine whether Marxism has any legitimate claim as a serious and honorable political tradition or deserves nothing better than its current consignment to the dustbin of history.

Maurice Isserman, a professor of history at Hamilton College, is writing a biography of the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington.